Greg Lake was born on November 10, 1947. A founding member of King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, he worked across singing, bass, guitar and songwriting. His role also reached behind the mixing desk: he produced ELP’s debut album, helping turn the trio’s individual ideas into a finished record.
Lake’s connection with Robert Fripp began before King Crimson. They studied with the same guitar teacher and learned one another’s playing while they were growing up. “We used to practice our lessons together,” Lake told Nick DeRiso in a 2012 Something Else! interview. That familiarity carried into their band, although Lake changed instruments: with Fripp on guitar, he took up bass because Crimson didn’t need two guitarists.
On King Crimson’s 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, Lake played bass and sang lead, including on “21st Century Schizoid Man” and “Epitaph.” His involvement continued through the transition that followed the original lineup. He returned as a guest vocalist for the second album, In the Wake of Poseidon, while preparing to begin work with ELP. His departure didn’t mean an immediate break from the music he and Fripp had started.
Lake had met keyboardist Keith Emerson while King Crimson and Emerson’s band, The Nice, were touring North America. Drummer Carl Palmer completed the new trio, which formed in 1970. For the debut, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Lake served as producer with Eddy Offord engineering. Alongside the group’s instrumental pieces was “Lucky Man,” a song Lake had written when he was 12.
Its recording gave Lake room to build an arrangement almost instrument by instrument. In a 2012 interview with Bill Kopp for Musoscribe, he recalled recording the track with Palmer and layering the bass, acoustic and electric guitars, and vocal harmonies himself. By the time Emerson joined in, Lake had already filled much of the available musical space, including a guitar solo. The remaining opening came at the end, where Emerson experimented with the Moog synthesizer. According to Lake, that exploratory performance was captured without Emerson realizing it was being recorded. The finished track joined a childhood composition to a studio experiment neither musician had planned at the outset.
That balance between songwriting and studio construction continued on Trilogy in 1972. Lake produced the album and wrote “From the Beginning,” keeping acoustic guitar within a band built around keyboards, bass and drums. He singled out Trilogy as his preferred ELP album in the Something Else! interview, but also acknowledged a practical problem: its “overdose of overdubs” made parts difficult to reproduce onstage. The recording offered possibilities that the three musicians couldn’t easily duplicate in concert.
Lake later made the stories behind his music part of the performance itself. His 2012 solo tour developed while he was writing his autobiography, bringing together his own songs, music by other artists and exchanges with the audience. Recordings from those shows became the 2013 live album Songs of a Lifetime. Lake died on December 7, 2016.
The live album leaves a particularly direct connection between the young guitarist and the established musician: the spoken recollection “My Very First Guitar” immediately precedes “Lucky Man.” A song written before either of his best-known bands existed became both a performance and a way to explain where his musical life began.
